mlandau@diamond.bbn.com (Matt Landau) (04/25/89)
A while back, I polled Sun-Spots for some advice about Cirprico Rimfire and Interphase 4400 (Phoenix) disk controllers, for use with Hitachi DK-815-10 disks. I got enough requests to summarize that it seems worth posting a followup message. Basically, pretty much everyone who responded said that both controllers pretty much just worked. Both Ciprico and Interphase offer Xylogics emulation at boot time, allowing you to boot an unmodified Sun from them. However, most people still suggested keeping a Sun-supported controller around to load major O/S upgrades and such (since Sun installation tools don't tend to be very cooperative where 3rd party devices are concerned). Everyone knows that both Cirprico and Interphase controllers are a lot faster than 451's, and most people believe them to be somewhat faster than 753/7053's, but no one had done any real performance measurements comparing them to each other. For the curious, I think what I've decided to do is put our new Hitachi's on Ciprico Rimfires, leave our old Eagles on the slow 450's or 451's for boot/upgrade purposes, and try really hard to put all of the high-demand filesystems on the newer, faster disks.